DNA genealogy sleuthing spurs arrest in 1973 killing of Stanford grad

Hayward man linked to decades-old slaying of Leslie Marie Perlov in the foothills west of Palo Alto, thanks to DNA genealogy analysis that has skyrocketed in use in the wake of the Golden State Killer arrest

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John Arthur Getreu, 74, of Hayward, was arrested Nov. 20, 2018 in connection with the 1973 murder of Leslie Marie Perlov, whose body was found in the Palo Alto hills west of Stanford and whose killing had gone unsolved until this year when DNA genealogical analysis helped detectives pinpoint Getreu as a suspect. (Santa Clara Co. Sheriff’s Office)

PALO ALTO — In another win for the rapidly rising use of DNA genealogy analysis to solve cold cases, authorities have arrested 74-year-old Hayward man in the grisly 1973 slaying of Stanford graduate Leslie Marie Perlov, whose body was found strangled and sexually assaulted in hills west of her alma mater.

John Arthur Getreu, 74, of Hayward, was arrested Nov. 20, 2018 in connection with the 1973 murder of Leslie Marie Perlov, whose body was found in the Palo Alto hills west of Stanford and whose killing had gone unsolved until this year when DNA genealogical analysis helped detectives pinpoint Getreu as a suspect. (Santa Clara Co. Sheriff’s Office)

John Arthur Getreu was arrested Tuesday and interrogated by detectives with the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office before he was booked into the Main Jail, where he is being held without bail on suspicion of Perlov’s murder.

Perlov was the victim of one of four headline-grabbing killings in the Stanford area between 1973 and 1974, and one of two that had gone unsolved until this year. In June, detectives linked the ritualistic killing of Arlis Perry at the Stanford Memorial Church to Stephen Blake Crawford, but Crawford shot and killed himself as authorities closed in on his San Jose apartment.

Perlov was a Stanford grad and aspiring law student on Feb. 13, 1973 working at the Palo Alto library, where she was last seen alive around 3 p.m. Later in the day, her orange 1972 Chevrolet Nova was spotted empty near Old Page Mill Road and Page Mill Road. Three days later, the Sheriff’s Office’s horseback unit found her body underneath an oak tree west of her car, strangled with pantyhose stuffed in her mouth and her skirt pulled up around her waist.

The case was dormant for decades, though small glimmers surfaced periodically, perhaps most famously when notorious serial killer Ted Bundy, days away from execution, confessed to a series of unsolved murders of young women, and made a nebulous reference to one in Palo Alto. But nothing could be corroborated beyond those vague statements.

Over the summer, detectives submitted several items from the Perlov case for DNA examination, and a criminalist with the county Crime Lab located “an unknown male DNA profile on evidentiary items provided by the Sheriff’s Office,” according to a news release. In July, the DNA sample was sent to Parabon NanoLabs, a Virginia-based company that combines DNA testing with several techniques highlighted by the use of genealogical mapping — including combing through family trees, online genealogy websites and public records — to link a person to relatives and ancestors and produce a more precise genetic profile and possible identity.

The method has exploded in profile and popularity in the wake of the April arrest of Joseph DeAngelo, the suspected Golden State Killer and East Area Rapist, after it was revealed that open-source genealogy analysis helped pinpoint him in one of the most prolific and infamous serial-killer cases in U.S. history. Then in September, similar techniques were used to spur the arrest of UC Berkeley employee Roy Charles Waller, who has since been charged with being the NorCal Rapist who terrorized Northern California in the 1990s.

Matt Braker, the Santa Clara County deputy district attorney who oversees the cold-case unit in his office — which also runs the crime lab — told this news organization in July that investigators had submitted evidence to Parabon for analysis, but declined to specify which cases were involved. It now appears that the Perlov killing, and possibly that of Perry, were among them.

In the revived Perlov investigation, detectives got a report back from Parabon with a final list of leads in the case.

“Upon receiving Parabon’s report, Sheriff’s Office investigators continued to investigate the murder of Leslie Perlov. As a result, John Arthur Getreu was identified as a suspect in our investigation,” reads a news release, which does not specify how many other suspects might have been looked at or whether Getreu had previously been a suspect in the killing. Getreu lived in Palo Alto at the time.

Sheriff’s detectives acquired a reference sample of Getreu’s DNA — they also did not specify how they did this, but often DNA is acquired passively by collecting a person’s trash or an item they touched — and submitted it for testing. The analysis revealed that Getreu was a match with the crime-scene DNA, and that the chances someone else was at the scene of Perlov’s killing is 1 in 65 septillion. For reference, that’s the number 65 followed by 24 zeroes.

IAssociated Press news clippings show that in 1964, an 18-year-old Getreu was charged with raping and killing a 16-year-old girl in Germany, while he was living with his father, a stationed U.S. Army sergeant major.

The victim was the daughter of an Army chaplain also stationed in Germany. German law at the time considered Getreu a juvenile when he was tried. The resolution of the case was not immediately retrievable.

With Getreu in custody, detectives are working with other police agencies to explore whether Getreu could be connected to other cold cases. With the Perlov and Perry cases at least partially solved, two unsolved murders in and around Stanford remain from that same time period.

On Sept. 11, 1973, 19-year-old junior David Levine was found stabbed 15 times next to Meyer Library. And on March 24, 1974, the body of 21-year-old Janet Ann Taylor, daughter of former Stanford athletic director and football legend Chuck Taylor, was found strangled in a ditch on Sand Hill Road.